Get started with Notion, sign up for free or unlock AI for $10 per month: ntn.so/WolfgangsChannel *Corrections:* - At 14:40, the N100's iGPU is not just 'playing back' the AV1 content, it's transcoding it to H.264 - Intel i3-6100 is a dual core processor, not quad core (15:25) *Links:* Asrock N100DC-ITX geni.us/ECsSoNr (Amazon) Jonsbo N2 geni.us/8rpN (Amazon) ASMedia ASM1166 M.2 SATA Controller geni.us/FL52EAe (Amazon) Trendnet 10Gbit SFP+ Adapter geni.us/wASn1 (Amazon) DC Jack to block terminals adapter geni.us/CFMe (Amazon) 4-pin ATX extension cable geni.us/Q26G (Amazon) PicoPSU geni.us/nX6uO (Amazon) Sharkoon SilentStorm SFX Bronze 450W geni.us/wKg3i3 (Amazon) As an Amazon Affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

@OlindoPindaro

2 ай бұрын

I had problem with my Asus n100 and hevc playback

@IOTWVUVWTOI

2 ай бұрын

ASUS H170i Pro mini !!!! Please! As a home server and as a router

@misterhat5823

2 ай бұрын

No.

@mullthedroneguy

Ай бұрын

If I manage get a 24 Pin ATX to 4 Pin ATX, or 24 Pin to 8 Pin then 8 Pin to 4 Pin, will that work? Would it be safer than just hacking the 24 Pin to jump the power?

21 күн бұрын

Why not full SSD build? It seems way simpler to power, lower consumption, quiet, smaller & possibly faster. Is it just HDD/SSD capacity vs. price consideration, or am I missing something?

I've learned a great deal from your videos, and I've been a UNIX/Linux systems administrator for 25 years (back to the days when I had to download a new kernel image over a 14.4Kbps modem and compile it - hours! - just to get a 3Com Ethernet adapter working). Keep up the good work.

6:52 the electrically and mechanically more safe option is to crimp the two pairs of cables together with a two-cable crimp each, before screwing them into the barrel jack (or rather its terminal block). But that's just a nit, I think your block is rated for multi-strand wire because there's a tiny metal plate between screw and cable, so it won't damage the strands. Still better crimped.

@legendaryz_ch

2 ай бұрын

Major hickup for me (network engineer and electrician) too haha glad im not the only one

@MartinZeitler

2 ай бұрын

Not a problem while they're nicely aligned parallel, so that the clap inside presses both down equally.

@legendaryz_ch

2 ай бұрын

@@MartinZeitler nah its fine wires not one big one. You always have to put a crimp on them otherwise it's a fire hazard especially if it's higher current!

Those screw terminal barrel jack connectors are usually only rated for around 600mA, so I'd recommend to use a soldered connector instead.

iperf3 before 3.16 version is single-threaded and can't saturate 10G by default. In order to saturate 10G you have to run multiple iperf3 server processes: iperf3 -s -p 5101&; iperf3 -s -p 5102&; iperf3 -s -p 5103 & and run multiple clients: iperf3 -c hostname -T s1 -p 5101 &; iperf3 -c hostname -T s2 -p 5102 &; iperf3 -c hostname -T s3 -p 5103 &;

@erikmagkekse

2 ай бұрын

Yes 100%, jumbo MTU might help here to, but the issue here is more likely that his PCIe 10G sfp+ card can only do PCIe 2.0 which limits to 2x4 GT/s

@5467nick

2 ай бұрын

@@erikmagkekse Video shows it hitting over 8Gb/s at 11:17. Also he claimed it has a new chipset.

@mzmatze

Ай бұрын

@@5467nick But even the latest Version (TEG-10GECSFP (Version v3.0R))is only PCIe 2.0 which would be a bottleneck if you only have two Lanes. However, the RJ45 Version (TEG-10GECTX (Version v3.0R)) has got an PCIe 3.0 Link, so two Lanes would be sufficient to saturate the 10GbE Network. This Info is directly from the Trendnet Homepage.

Awesome video dude. Thanks to your tip my N100 NixOS home server is finally running at C8 and not C3 like before.

Very good work. Thank you for sharing. Loved it from start to end. Only potential omission (from my point of view) is a short mention of relevant BIOS settings (in addition to the Realtek NIC) to minimize power consumption.

Have been tracking your channel for a while. Great stuff. Looking forward to your build video. Immediately bought three of these for my new low-power, quiet Ceph cluster.

I got the N100M exactly because I would've needed to hack a standard PSU to power the DC version and it has significantly less room to add cards. I think it's a pretty nice platform to work with, really power efficient and flexible. About the SSDs I would advise againt splicing in more connectors from the on board JST connector because, even if they use less power, it's pulling from 5V instead of 12V so it's using a rail with less current available then 12V. It's also weird seeing it not idling down to C10. My N100M with TrueNAS Scale goes to C10 and the NIC is not giving me that issue. Last but not least, if cooling is sufficient, you can bring the short and long TDP to 30W and get better transcoding performance since the long TDP on the board is just 10W.

@aliancemd

2 ай бұрын

I have a few N100 boards and all show over 96% in C10 state - the worst being the Proxmox server. Edit: I think I might know why his CPU didn't go to C10 state. I just read the 12th Gen processor datasheet and it says that the dependency for that is "Display in PSR or powered off" - none of my servers have a display attached and powertop even says GPU "Powered On 0.0%". It might just be that in his case, he had the iGPU busy, which doesn't allow it to go from C8, to C10.

@wildefyri

2 ай бұрын

Well no consumer SSDs use the 12V rail on SATA molex connectors... So your reasoning there for not using the connector is not really valid.

@TommyThousandFaces

2 ай бұрын

He said "the only case in which I would recommend this solution is if you're building an SSD only NAS, since SSDs need less power than hard drives". Power is a product of voltage and current. If the connector can only output 2A per pin and there's only one 5V pin the connector supports a maximum of 10W. Which is not a lot of power if you wanna use more than two consumer SSDs. Usually SSDs are rated to use 1A, so even when using SSDs you're limited to two drives unless you want to risk it. And, if you just didn't know, that connector carries 12 and 5V but only 5V is used for SSDs.

@janreal84

2 ай бұрын

got myself the same one and I'm pleased with it, too

@trixniisama

2 ай бұрын

How low in power consumption can the N100M get in the C10 state?

Hey, the barrell jack adapter does not have spring loaded contacts, so you want to crimp your wires before screwing them in. If you don't they can come loose during operation and this is a fire hazard.

I really thanks your video and all of video comments. It will help my current nas build. and I learned wire need crimp.

Thank you for your channel! It is a really nice resource when shopping for hardware. I was contemplating a N100DC, but chose a N100M with separate Pico PSU because of availability. I would like more cheap alternatives with ECC, but that is just my preference.

re: low networking throughput from the NIC the AQN-100 supports up to 8 parallel queues ( AQ_CFG_VECS_DEF ) to help balance interrupt handling / work over multiple CPU cores [even while the workload is only a single TCP connection]; it might be a little hobbled by only being on 4 kinda slow cores since it can't fully take advantage of the existing hardware parallelism a similar TDP processor with 8 real cores to service hardware interrupts in parallel might achieve better throughput, even if the individual cores were somewhat slower

@patrickdk77

2 ай бұрын

also double check what congestion control algo is being used, on a direct connection over 20gbit fiber, it can change my results with iperf3 from 3gbit to 19gbit, I mostly use bbr

@rickysargulesh1053

2 ай бұрын

Do you know how many parallel queues a X520-DA2 has?

They make a micro atx version of this board called the N100-M, which has a full size pci-e slot and uses a standard ATX power supply.

Good video man !

I've seen that situation with iperf3 before. I was just recently looking at some MoCA videos and decided to go with that to improve my mesh system, and in one video it was pointed out that iperf3 wasn't using the full gigabit connection, but with the parameter for parallel streams, it did reach gigabit speed. I had the same experience once I set up the MoCA boxes for myself. You're definitely not alone there. This was an interesting build as I've been thinking about looking at what N100 boards would be like, especially for power consumption, for something like this.

Another great video. Thanks mate. I saw a glimpse of Traefik in this video. Would love to see a setup of it like you did with Nginx Proxy Manager.

I migrated my old NAS to a N2 with my old N6005 board. All I can say is that I love it (now). It's purely a NAS running nothing else other that TrueNAS core. I've not even considered an upgrade to N100/N300 as I do not believe it will offer any additional benefits. Great video, otherwise. Learn something new every day and I have met that small challenge. Thanks for the effort you obviously put into this video.

Hi Wolfgang Wolfgang! - lol, that made me chuckle….

This pulled me over the line. Been looking at this board for a while now, but was doubting about the performance. Think I am going to acquire an N100M for new NAS

Just read the 12th gen processor datasheet and one of the requirements to go from C8, to C10 is: "Display in PSR or powered off". You could potentially go to C10, if you make sure the iGPU is not busy with work. All my N100 servers(which don't have displays attached, btw) are in C10 state. Just a wild guess but it might work.

@ppn7

2 ай бұрын

with VMs, it's almost impossible to avoid iGPU i guess ? That's why i prefer using a headless OS with all containers in docker.

A very interesting video for all those who want to buy efficient hardware. Now, for those of us who already have hardware, and at the moment cannot change it, the software part would be very interesting. Do you have a video where you explain that setup with Unraid and different containers? The tricks and ways to configure the Dockers of delugevpn, prowlarr, booksonic, cloudflared, invoiceninja, nextcloud, paperless, photprism, radarr, recyclarr, sonarr and vaultwarden would be very appreciated. Thanks for everything Wolfgang.

Nice update to your last Serv-Nas-Homelab build ! ~Evilcorp crippleware hack, brings tech to the masses !

I have this board! It sits under my TV. Also it's nice for someone like yourself to review this board and show off the capabilities. If I get some drives, I'll probably upgrade mine to a very similar setup to yours, though likely 2.5GbE.

@MrMoralHazard

2 ай бұрын

Do you by any chance use the onboard audio with the 3.5mm ports? I am looking for a cheap board that I can directly plug my (cheap old) 5.1 System into directly. If you tried it, how was the quality? Not looking for high end, but it also shouldn't be terrible.

@LeminskiTankscor

2 ай бұрын

@@MrMoralHazard sorry! I'm using only the HDMI for audio. I would test, but I literally lack the "ear" to tell you if the 3.5mm is worth a damn or not.

I use the N100M as main working PC. With 32 GB RAM and Debian 12 it is more than enough for programming with nodejs. With the low power consumption I can power it entirly from solar (island-system). An best of all... silence... I use two case fans but they only run on full cpu load. This is the first low power mainboard where I can configure the case fans for 0% on low work load. I love working on a complete silent pc :)

Can't wait for the build and setup video. The power consumption on this beast is brilliant! Please also mention the cost of the build.

Who did your video transcription? They did great

Thanks for the interesting video! I was wondering at the beginning why you didn't use the "ASUS Prime N100I-D D4", but if you need the higher PCI-E speed for a 10gb network card, it's clear again. Presumably the external power supply of the Asrocks board also needs less power than the ATX/SFX power supply of the Asus board, right? I have seen a very similar construction proposal at "Elefacts" and am still thinking about it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the NIC just overheats, since this is the exact same issue I had until I strapped a little Noctua fan onto the heat sink of my 10G NIC. Might be worth a shot

@legendaryz_ch

2 ай бұрын

Have a passively cooled Asus 10G in my PC still which doesnt overheat at all... Its due to iperf not taking advantage of multiple cores i think. Had the same issue on a low power Intel pc but between my zen 3 and zen 4 40w+ ryzens it's fine

Nice video, will you be adding the achieved transfer speeds with the 10Gbps network card and the 5 drives to the build video?

I´m running one for my OPNsense FW with a dual 2.5G NIC. For some reason it kept crashing. The culprit was DRAM voltage being too low on a 3200 16GB stick. The XMP support in the UEFI is kinda weird. Anyway for 24/7 operation in a case I slapped on a little fan for airflow. Now it runs with no problems.

Very nice NAS-project! Because of the bandwith-issue, i once had a switch (some TP-Link if i remember correctly) that listed in the specs that it would auto-adjust the framesize, but this actually nerver worked. After updating the switch, i could set this setting manually and actually enable jumbo frames.

@mmuller2402

2 ай бұрын

Managed switch from tp link? Nice 😊

@loetzs.878

2 ай бұрын

@@mmuller2402 i think the model name was something "jetstream ". it actually was not mine, i just made it run for the customer...

How well do you reckon a full ATX would run compared to the smaller variant? I assume it would fix some issues like power issues, but what about any other potential ones?

love your videos ! i bought a used hp sff business pc for £50 to use as a minecraft server, i feel like it's unbeatable for home servers

Ok. I was expecting to see more NAS related stuff. ZFS, truenas, unraid? configurations and performance on those sata ports. Looking forward for that.

@thezfunk

2 ай бұрын

Open source version of Synology OS

Good video. Thank you.

I went in a different direction. Bought the Aoostar R1, added 2 20tb drives for storage, bam low power media server running at 10 watts from the wall with the hard drives spun down, plus you can set the bios to run the N100 at 15w tdp for more performance at a max temp of 70c.

Perfect timing. I am considering a n100 board for a NAS too. Curious if you would recommend this board over a N100M with more expansion or the Cwwk / Topton N100 boards. My goal is low power, not necessarily high network speed

@andrewparsons1041

2 ай бұрын

I'm also interested in how the Asrock N100DC-ITX compares to the CWWK and Topton motherboards N100 boards.

@M4XD4B0ZZ

2 ай бұрын

I second this

@Eujanous

2 ай бұрын

The problem is that Cwwk / Topton N100 boards have the JMB585 chip, which prevent the system to reach deep c-states which result to higher consumption.

@fwiler

2 ай бұрын

@@Eujanous That needs to be compared to see actual results. If jmb585 is more efficient than it may not make much difference.

Thanks for this video. I had a SF750 laying around so thought i'd give it go. I haven't been able to achieve 10w at idle though. The lowest i've got to is 19w with 2xSSD and 3xHDD, the ASM1166, 32Gb RAM and 2x Noctua fans. No PCI-E card used, all drives but the appdata ssd spun down, l1 aspm enabled for the realtek and powertop auto tune. Were you able to achieve 10w with unraid? I also tried using a picopsu with an old xbox brick, changing the RAM to 4Gb, disconnecting all fans with little to no change. The power consumption between the picopsu and the SF750 is around 1-2w. Also used tips and tweaks in unraid to set the cpu scaling to power save.

In the UK, the cheapest I could find one of those 10G NICs was for just over £80 from Misco.

If you must poke wires into a power connector at least use a resistor to limit the current if you make a mistake. Deburring and grommets are a good practice if you route wires through sheet metal

Can you also take a look at the AMD 8000G series if that's possible, the 300€/$+ without a mainboard is a bit more for a small channel..

I think for me the most valuable data was right at the end. I never know where exactly to place these CPUs like the n100 in relation to their bigger brothers in the core i-something series. So the performance and performance per watt graphic really helps.

@arouraios4942

2 ай бұрын

Keep in mind that's a 6th gen i3. So we don't know how it compares to a current gen cpu

@bzuidgeest

2 ай бұрын

@@arouraios4942 yes, but it still is a reference to something I'm more familiar with. Let's take Intel's atom CPU, it never came off that favorably, compared to it's bigger brothers, not even a generation offset.

there was a misleading information about the N100 vs I3-6100 performance.. Because you calculated the TDP of 6 vs TDP of 51. I'm pretty sure that the N100 goes above 20W when running Cinebench R23. I dont think it will be 8.5 times more efficient at the same performance. Can you please measure? Thanks. Love your videos!

I've just been experimenting with a bunch of low powered Q170T boards that I got extremely cheap. Power (and drive power) were a concern for sure. I thought about adapting the 19V external PSU the other way around, but the cases I'm aiming for need a TFX or 1U PSU though, so maybe the way that you did it is way better.

In some ways i kinda wish the manufacturers for the n-series motherboards are crazy enough to cram basic IO (SATA/LAN/USB3) onto a single pcie lane and expose the remaining 8 as pciex4 slots

What about the Asus Pro WS W680M-ACE SE??? I know its not cheap but its probably cheaper than trying to find a C246 these days and its much more modern, has ECC support, 10gb networking and you could get a nice new low power intel chip with quicksync

I'm convinced by this video, and I almost forget that I don't want to build a NAS.

Nice video! It would have been interesting for you test real world network file transfer speeds with Truenas, etc. as that’s what really matters to most of us.

Soldering will help to improve the DC connector, as you solder directly into the board.

Pretty amazing how low power it runs...

6W quad core, swappable single channel DIMM in server style that allows direct airflow, NVMe, dual sata, an OPEN PCI-E x2 slot....Yeah this is pretty much what I need. My home server is a 2009 era eMachines with a single core 1.6GHz 2650e, 2GB, dual sata 3gbps, PCI-E g2x1 (empty) and g2x16 (10GbE SFP). This looks like a more than suitable replacement in speed alone.

Van you pls do a video on how to make existing hardware more efficient. Your videos are nice but keeping your old stuff is cheaper and some people cannot afford buying a new motherboard every time you do a video. Very informative video

@RaytheonTechnologies_Official

2 ай бұрын

To improve power efficiency you need to reduce the distance between transistors on a chip, so there is less electrical resistance between them Typically this is done by shrinking the manufacturing node from say 14nm to say 7nm. So you'd need to buy a new chip to take advantage of that. But what big tech doesn't want you to know is that you can shrink the distance between transistors yourself by just pushing really hard on the sides of the chip. My trick is to take my CPU and put it in a vice and then squeeze as hard as I can. Using this method I've turned a 28nm Xeon v2 into a 7nm Epyc 7002 (although the pressure did make some transistors pop out of the side).

What about ASROCK N100 and Corsair RM550X, not the best combo for power consumption ? A good alternative for install few HDD without any problem right ?

The sybylant sound at 9:33 scared my cat

The Avoton/Denverton based boards are really, really good. I think they check all the boxes for what you're looking for in a small low power motherboard. Those chips were designed from the ground up by Intel to perform exactly the function you're trying to achieve. Plus they support ECC memory, which is awesome. I used to have an AsRock C2750D4I. Mini ITX. 8 core Silvermont/Bay Trail generation low power Atom processor, with four DDR3 slots supporting ECC. 12 SATA ports. PCIe-8x slot. IPMI onboard with a dedicated ethernet port, plus two additional onboard gigabit ports. And they're old enough now that you can probably get them for cheap. The newer Denverton based boards are probably significantly better, but I haven't had direct experience with those. The only reason I got rid of the C2750D4I was because I moved to 10 gigabit fibre and the poor little Atom cores couldn't push more than about 190 megabytes/second over rsync when I was doing backups between servers.

@marsovac

2 ай бұрын

You are off the mark. Those atoms cant transcode 4k/hdr in any serious way

Thanks for the great video. The board is really sweet. The idle power consumption is amazing. It's a shame that there are not more PCIe lanes to go around. There are simply not enough lanes to get to SATA6 speeds while also having 10Gbit networking. That might be fine for spinning disks but I am still looking for the 'perfect' 6-8 disk, all flash NAS. It's a real shame that all those efficient Fujitsu boards are incredibly hard to com by.

have you ever tried an ARM home media server? Im about to get a Kandas single board computer to use for automated transcoding my library and playback via kodi + jellyfin. ARM boards have gotten really cool lately and they "should" be lower power. Would be a really cool vid, i hope you consider it

1:15 of course there is the j5040-itx it can handle 4 drives and has also a pcie connector and a m.2 wifi port. it supports 2 4k streams and is also passive cooled, has dual channel ram with max 8gb per channel. pared with a 12v adapter and a pico psu you can go low as 5w on idle.

@WolfgangsChannel

2 ай бұрын

The PCI slot on it is 2.0 x1 - which is the main reason why I prefer the N100DC-ITX board, as mentioned multiple times in the video. Besides, it costs almost the same as N100 boards new and comes with worse performance and an older iGPU

The power draw is amazing though, I tried a friendly elec nas board with RK3588 and topped at 13W if I remember. They say that x86 consumes more but well, it all goes to CPU manufacturing (7nm in this case), motherboard connected devices etc... Can't wait to have the equivalent of N100 but in 1nm in 2027 !

Hi very nice video and very good channel. I have a question about the limitation of the 4 pins power connector. In the datasheet I see voltage rating at 100V and curent rating at 2 amp, so the max power must be 100*2=200W, if we see the HDD's datasheet all the curent must be with a 12V voltage, so with 2.5 A the max power startup must be 30 W. Do my calculs are right ?

Hope AsRock releases an upgraded CPU + DDR5 version with more sata3 connectors. If so I'm all in.

Its such a pita to find suitable itx boards (especially in my country) that I gave up and always chose flex-ATX boards with a SFX PSU instead. Is it bigger? Yes. But we can always hide it in a piece of furniture...

I would love to see you build the ultimate Unraid-Plex home server with 5-6 SATA HDDs using the new Minisforum MS-01 taking out the motherboard and putting in a small case and also putting a cheap graphics card that can easily handle at least 4x4K streams with transcoding!

Looks awesome. Explaining computers did a really nice miniPC build with a N100 board. Think it was different to this one. Also Supermiro has an awesome relatively low power (for the number of cores etc) epyc ITX board. This is great if you want more lanes. Also, it should last forever. Obviously, it is more expensive......

@hallsofvalhalla1749

2 ай бұрын

I didn't check, but bifurcation on the PCIe slot is a really good option for addition drives. Not all boards have this though.

@ollymilly6173

2 ай бұрын

I built a desktop with LMDE running on ASRock N100M with an NVME SSD and 16GB Kingston memory, almost like Explaining Computers did, except I use HDMI output to an LG TV. Everything would be fine, but to my huge disappointment the system tends to freeze or reload spontaneously. I have tried Debian as well as almost all available Debian-based distros with different desktop environments, Fedora desktop - with no effect. Finally I ended up with LMDE that seems to be more stable on my hardware. As for working as remotely controlled NAS or home server -- N100M MoBo worked with no issues at all. It seems the problem is somewhere with video output/drivers.

I just built this. The problem is not only the DC pins can handle only two amps but the on-board DC-DC converter is only 90W (basically on board picoPSU). I don't have that many data, so I am fine for now, but I was thinking down the road I can get those external HDD power supplies (give you a molex with 12 and 5 Volts) OR since I have some soldering skills - make a little DC-DC PCB from 19 to 12 and 5 Volts and power everything I need from one beefy 19V laptop adapter. But then again, by the time I will fill up my 14 Tb, some new board like N500 will come out, that would have a more powerful DC-DC converter on board with more PCI-e lanes and more SATAs.

@Beatleman91

2 ай бұрын

Sorry for spam, was trying to comment multiple times, but yt doesn't like me mentioning some chinese ali-shop

To be honest, N100 can be configured with higher TDP.As for certain N100 Box configured with 25w TDP with 16G DDR5 4800 RAM, its Geekbench6 score can achieve around 3300, which is quite close to skylake 4 cores i5 :D But it performed a lot worse when it's configured with 6 watts TDP, though. :) I was using it with Windows 10 back then with my N100 box, changing TDP between 6w and 25w in BIOS really made a huge difference :) Thanks for your great videos and they help me save my power bills a lot :D

Moin aus Münster. Can you please provide bit more infomation about C-States? How you check, debug and configure them?

@subrezon

2 ай бұрын

Moin, he has a video about this called "Building a power efficient home server", released a year ago.

@UNIm95

2 ай бұрын

@@subrezon Thanks a lot. Somehow i missed this video.

@joels7605

2 ай бұрын

You can usually just run powertop if you're running linux. It's a pretty good little utility.

@technikchaot

2 ай бұрын

​@@joels7605this is still only for people that know what c-states mean many don't know what this concept even is. And I don't blame them they aren't really focused in most hardware channels, reviews etc.

Tbf I wouldn't be too comfortable running a "hacked" psu instead of the provided one, especially if you have to buy one just for that purpose it kinda defeat the premise of the motherboard in the first place. I think something like the N100I-D D4 would make more sense, even if you have to ditch the 10Gb card.

@I_Evo

2 ай бұрын

Small point, this board doesn't come with a power supply.

What you could do instead for the power IMO is put a female barrel jack in those two wifi antena openings and use a small jumper cable to connect that to the board power. The whole "pull 4 cables from inside the case to plug into something outside looks a bit botched IMO.

Yep, there is no replacement for this board, if we talking about support for 10Gbps NIC, but to be honest Asus Prime N100I-D D4 is also not that bad, at least it has second M.2 e-key port with PCIe (Asrock M.2 e-key port hasn't PCIe), so it can be used to install AI accelerator or „slightly” slower 2.5-5Gbps NIC, and it's a bit cheaper.

I've been eyeing the n100 for a while now, I want to replace my Athlon 5350, which I can get to hit around 15W @ idle with one drive.

N100m video?

i thought for a long time about going for an asrock or asus n100 card but finally, i bought a tiny pc hp prodesk mini, i5 8500t, 8gb ddr4, 256gb ssd nvme for 95€. I just added 2x16gb ddr4 and 1tb hdd sata + 1tb usb hdd. With all this added, idle power consumption is 5w on Debian 12, C10 pkg (no monitor, no mouse, no keyboard) Of course I don't have parity, but that's not crucial in my case.

I'm really enjoying this slow merging between the PC and embedded worlds, which is gifting us with setups that can run at 15W while delivering a machine that's still essentially a PC (so you don't need to use RS232 and _dark magic_ to set up the bootloader, for example xD). About 4 years ago, I put together a similar setup at work (this one based around a Celeron Gold) to serve as a gigabit router with VPN site-link capabilities, NAS capabilities, and WiFi authentication - with it consuming about 65W of power (about 75W with the disks in place) -- and I have yet to run out of processing capabilities on that thing. But 10W absolutely _destroys_ 65W at idle. :D

What are mounting holes for that nas? would it support bigger cooler? *yes i know it is overkill*

Managed to get my hp prodesk 400 to idle at 5 ish watts (jumps between 4 to peaks of 6 occasionally) with 2 hdd spun down whilst running samba shares with mergerfs on the proxmox host, haos vm & jellyfin lxc, i3 8100 16g ram, 1 disk spinning is 12w, 2 is about 18, under load is about 60w

Great stuff. I was asking in the comment about Mellanox Connect -X3 which is terrible. My server needed more horsepower so I went with i3 14100. Bought Intel X710 (dual port) for 100EUR with 2 transceivers. It goes down to C8 and there is a 10G speed always. Server is just one thing. Got RACK with 2 switches (8x10G SFP+ and 8x1G (4x POE+)), shutdown server with ipmi and 18 cores, 1x router, 1x wifi 6 AP, 1x camera, above i3 server and UPS. Previously with server based on this 18 core xeon total idle consumption was 136W, went down to 69W with i3 which is still a lot. So there are also unoptimized things like camera (15W!), ups (not measured) and IPMI (5W), probably networking could also do better.

You'd be surprised how much power SSDs can use. I've been looking into it. Some SATA SSDs can be 6w at full load meaning that 2.5a on the 5v pin of the JST is only really good for two. I have a couple of U.2 SSDs in a rig here and those are rated 20-25w load

Theres another similar board with 6 sata ports on amazon. about to pick one up for an offsite backup build

Despite what the manual says I have a N100 running with 32GB, runs like a charm.

I'm new to this. May I know what OS do you install on that N100?

Hi great video. I have 1 question i can replace Asrock motherboard to ASUS Prime N100I-D D4. Is better for me that motherboard has Itx 24 pines connector. Thanks

I did just the same but with the Gigabyte N5105I H, comes with a past generation CPU but can handle easily truenas and over a gigabyte transfers

I was having issues with Proxmox not getting the full 10Gb/s tx speeds either unless I use the bind option for some reason. Might be worth trying out / looking into.

That’s how the Aquantia hits 10G, by doing MAC teaming in the firmware. It’s actually a 4x2.5GbE interface pretending to be a 10GbE interface.

I have same build,without 10GBps. I haven’t transcoded yet. So,would you recommend this for 4k content. What about from av1 to h264? Did you have glitches after a while? Wouldn’t you use a fan and make the board use higher power consumption for higher requirements moments?

@WolfgangsChannel

2 ай бұрын

Yes, it can handle a single stream 4K transcode pretty well. Haven't tested it with multiple streams yet. Keep in mind, that the Dune results also include HDR tone mapping. If you want to play back SDR content, you're gonna get even better results. I've run the Cinebench R23 test with and without a fan, and didn't see a big difference.

@masip85

2 ай бұрын

@@WolfgangsChannel i want 4k and hdr. I want a library in av1, not transcoding for tv with av1, and the possibility of second transcoded streaming to 1080 sdr. I am still figuring out the rr configuration mess,so haven’t been able to test it yet. What about BT2020 content? Does it demands more? The fan: thanks for the reference. I had vetter expentations after robtech video of this board (6:03)

Nice!

Why not full SSD build? It seems way simpler to power, lower consumption, quiet, smaller & possibly faster. Is it just capacity vs. price consideration, or am I missing something?

hey there, do you have th e link to the Igor's Lab video you mentioned, i'd like to watch that.

If one were in the market to buy a new board to upgrade their nas/home server, would you recommend one of those m.2 to SATA adapters, a regular pcie-sata adapter, or perhaps a SAS HBA? For software raid. Seeing (and also experiencing) reviews that pcie-sata isn't great for raid.. and a SAS HBA seems to be a reliable way to connect upwards of 8 drives

@WolfgangsChannel

2 ай бұрын

SAS HBAs are notoriously power hungry, but are also server grade products with good reliability. Simple PCIe SATA controllers like ASM1166 are very power efficient, but are of consumer quality. Lots of mainstream consumer motherboards however use ASMedia cards for SATA expansion - so they're also pretty reliable. I've been using ASM1166-based SATA expansion cards since a few years now, and never had a single issue, but your mileage may vary.

@BanjoGate

2 ай бұрын

@@WolfgangsChannelMuch obliged. I think I am still going to err on the side of an HBA. My nas isn't one that is always on, I primarily use it for offline backups... but it is showing its age. Z68 chipset, only two sata3 ports, and four drives on a PCIE SATA which I think is under preforming. But hey at least I can read and write at sata2 speeds.... mostly... :')

Would you be willing to check out the (kind of) new CWWK NAS motherboard that uses a ryzen 7840HS? I know it's probably a bit more power hungry than any of these intel boards, but it seems like CWWK learned a lot - they still have 4×2.5GbE ports, but the 7840HS has a lot more PCIe lanes available, so the m.2 slots are 2 lanes (gen4), there's a full size pcie slot (running at 8x lanes), usb 4.0 and 3.2, and the additional SATA ports use ASM1164/1166 controllers instead of the JMB585. And it has dual channel ddr5 slots! It is pricey, but is still very interesting

I am thinking to swap my Asus n100 mobo with ryzen 7 7840hs topton Nas mobo. Opinion?

Question: Did you change any bios settings before power testing? Mine idles at 10w out of the box.

Please please please please please do......! In the pcie slot and the nvme slot put a 16GB optane nvme, these are actually 14GB each. Put them in raid, put the swapfile on this raid, put the os on a sata drive. Test with 4GB ram plus 28GB raid0 optane swapfile against 32GB ram with no swapfile and 4GB ram with no optane, just sata ssd swapfile. Also, safe to run n100 off eee pc power brick 12v x 3A = 36W?

Question: Why not use the N100m board?

Thanks you for this video. I juste have one question : what about the data on the drives if the controller on the M.2 SATA converter failed? How to rebuild the content of the hard drives? Thx 😊

@eDoc2020

2 ай бұрын

They're just regular SATA ports. You can connect the drives to any other controller and everything would be there and work the same. It's not a RAID card.

Hey, Thanks for the nice video. One question to the pcie power management (Min. 4:18). What is the problem, if the motherboard/sata controller does not support it?

@WolfgangsChannel

2 ай бұрын

The power consumption increases

As long as you were doing a bit of custom cables, you could also use your 19 V power supply to branch to a straight through 19 V to your motherboard and 2 cheap-ish buck regulators, 12 V @5V, and 5V at 6A both available on Amazon or ebay for under 20 usd add a SATA power cables. A little more involved, but may less intimidating (perhaps cheaper) than working with a 120/240 V power supply.

@evanvandenberg2260

Ай бұрын

I don't think the buck converters + 19V power brick would do much for the efficiency. Given that the bulk of the "active" or spun up power draw is 12V & 5V for the HDD, you'd be loosing allot via those buck converts.

@SuperFredAZ

Ай бұрын

@@evanvandenberg2260 it wasn't for efficiency, the idea was not to use a 240V supply.

Apart from the form factor, is there any other reason not to choose the ASRock N100M? There you can directly use a normal 12v Pc power supply

@WolfgangsChannel

2 ай бұрын

Nope